Volume 36, Number 4 (Fall) 2001
Hill, Carolyn J., and Robert T. Michael. 2001. "Measuring Poverty in the NLSY97." Journal of Human Resources 36(4):727-761.
Using data from the NLSY97, we construct two measures of poverty using the official U.S. definition and the National Research Council (NRC) definition. We estimate the two poverty rates for 1996 for youths 12-16 as 17.9 (official) and 23.4 (NRC), and document the discrepancies between youths considered in poverty under the two measures. We also explore the influence of poverty on youths' outcomes using the official and NRC measures of poverty. The paper shows that the prevalence of poverty and its measured consequences are affected by the way we measure poverty.
Carolyn J. Hill is visiting assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University. Robert T. Michael is dean of the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. They thank David Betson and Kathleen Short for their help in constructing the NRC poverty variables, Wendell Primus for helpful comments on the conference draft, and Yoonae Jo and Ye Luo for their work on coding and documenting variables used in this analysis. Funding support for this paper was provided by the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. The Office of the Assistant Secretary, Planning and Evaluation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides core funding for the JCPR. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning May 2002 through April 2005 from Carolyn Hill ( cj-hill@uchicago.edu ).
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X